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You may have heard that knowing the customer is more important than ever, and central to that process is voice-of-the-customer. A recent case study shows why.

tw telecom (News - Alert) recently faced the addition of 20,000 new small and medium-sized business accounts when it merged with another company. The problem, according to a blog post by Lynn Hunsaker in Customer Think, was that these customers were far different than tw telecom’s normal customers. To understand these customers, tw telecom focused on voice-of-the-customer to understand these new accounts.

Why we’re mentioning tw is not just because they cared about understanding their customers. It was the way they tackled voice-of-the-customer and the results that came from their approach.

The company reduced customer churn by 27 percent as a result of their focus on voice-of-the-customer, and it improved its Net Promoter Score by 65 percent. It also outperformed its competitors by 20 percent in sales, purchasing, ordering, installation, billing, service inquiry, maintenance and account management processes, according to Hunsaker.

The reason for these stellar improvements was not only because the company focused on voice-of-the-customer, but also because it took a very holistic approach to the process that was driven by senior management. The EVP of operations championed the project, and that helped operational silos come down and got the whole company to embrace voice-of-the-customer.

“We evolved the VoC program out of Marketing, merging with the Customer Care and Business Operations teams to maintain independence as a best practice,” Lara Wise, VP of customer experience, told Hunsaker. “The more we feel what it is that they experience, and adapt to them, the more loyal they are. It’s been much easier being part of the operations organization, to get adoption from other departments across the company, helping them see their connection to customer loyalty.”

Voice-of-the-customer must be the focus across all business units to be maximally effective, because every part of a business affects the customer, either directly or indirectly. So if the customer experience is fully taken into consideration, all parts of the business needs to be thinking about the customer.

“Go beyond traditional VoC,” advises Hansaker. “Search your company for other types of customer studies that can add new insights to VoC. Advertising, branding, user experience (UX), R&D and other departments typically conduct studies that can create greater context for VoC data. De-silo customer experience management.”

As tw telecom has shown, a holistic and de-siloed approach can make a huge difference.